


Shepard and the Machine

by barbex



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Enthusiastic Consent, Other, Robot Sex, Robot/Human Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-03
Updated: 2019-03-03
Packaged: 2019-11-08 19:25:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17987186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/barbex/pseuds/barbex
Summary: Legion shows Shepard how human she is.





	Shepard and the Machine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ScientistSalarian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScientistSalarian/gifts).



> The prompt asked for smut and I'm here to deliver!
> 
> And thanks to LauraEMoriarty for beta reading!

* * *

 

"Shepard-Commander."

"Yes, Legion?"

"Humans seek the company of others. They spend leisure time with other people for the sole purpose of being with them, without immediate performative outcome."

Shepard holds her arm out in front and pulls it over to stretch her shoulder, first on one side, then on the other. The bench she's sitting on is hardly the most comfortable but ever since someone has placed a cushion on it, it has become her favorite place on the ship.

"Are you going to ask a question?" Shepard asks.

For a platform with thousands of programs, working simultaneously on communicating with her, Legion often needs a surprising long time to formulate a sentence.

"Your leisure time is severely limited, Shepard-Commander," Legion says, his head-section turning to her in a strangely familiar, almost human, move, "compared to other members of the crew on this ship. Of that limited leisure time, you spend 89.74 percent with us."

Shepard smiles to herself. "You still haven't asked me a question."

Legion's head swivels forward again and the geth platform unfolds its legs and walks towards the rows of hardware that house EDI's programs. "Why do you spend 89.74 percent of your limited leisure time with us, instead of other members of your crew, Shepard-Commander?"

"I like being here."

"Why, Shepard-Commander?"

"It's quiet. You don't ask me how I cope."

Legion walks back to her and folds down again. His head-section is now at her eye level and the light inside is dimmed as he points it at her.

Shepard puts her hand on the geth head, peering into the light. "Can I ask a question?"

"Of course, Shepard-Commander."

"When you look at me like that, do you dim the light?"

"Yes."

"What made you do that?"

"Your reactions to our light at full brightness has been registered as discomfort. We do not want to cause such discomfort."

Shepard smiles, tracing her thumb over the edge of the circular head. "That's very thoughtful of you, thank you."

"Shepard-Commander, your touch registers as non-violent. What is the purpose of it?"

She smiles at that and her facial muscles seem to protest against this strange sensation. "I guess I'm still human enough to think that physical touch conveys emotional connection to another being."

Legion doesn't react to that but Shepard knows that he heard her and that his processes are working on possible interpretations of what she said. Her one hour of undisturbed rest is up, as a message on her omni-tool likes to remind her, and she gets up to leave the AI core.

"See you later, Legion." She always says that. Legion asked her once if it was a promise.

"Shepard-Commander," Legion says in his way of saying 'see you later'.

*~~~*

Shepard steps into the AI core. "You wanted to speak to me?"

"Shepard-Commander, we have modified this platform."

"In what way?"

"We have equipped this platform with surface receptors."

Shepard steps closer to look at him. The metallic surface of the geth platform looks normal from further back but when she steps closer, she can make out a thin golden weave on the surface. "With this you can feel how I touch you?"

"Yes."

Shepard lets her finger glide over the surface of Legion's arm, barely enough to touch. The golden weave ripples in hexagons under her finger.

"Shepard-Commander." Legion's head section swivels around, his head flaps rising with the sound of several servos starting up. "We have not yet calibrated our receptors."

"Maybe you should ask Garrus for help." Shepard grins at him.

"We are capable of calibrating ourselves." Waves ripple over the golden weave on Legion's surface. His head section keeps moving, looking at his arm and at Shepard and back. If he were a human, Shepard would call his behaviour 'twitchy'.

"So, this is a soft touch, how does this feel?"

"Our reactions are positive."

Shepard lays her hand flat on his arm. The metal is surprisingly warm to touch and the vibrations of servos travels through it. It makes the platform feel almost alive. "How does that feel?"

"Our reactions are positive."

Shepard smiles, stroking up towards the shoulder joint. "Can you differentiate the reactions? Do some feel better than others?"

"Conflicting data."

Shepard keeps her hand on Legion's upper arm and lets her thumb rub over the joint connector. The weave ripples, golden hexagons shimmering.

"Shepard-Commander, we would like to touch you."

She looks up to him, realizing how very human it is of her to search for meaning in someone's face. How useless if that person does not have a face to speak of. She looks back to the weave shimmering around her hand instead, organic in its reactions despite its technical hexagon visualisation.

"Let me take off my jacket." She shrugs out of it, leaving her in her tank top and she places her bare arm on his, covering the whole length. The weave curls around her arm, acting like its trying to extend itself onto her skin.

"Shepard-Commander." There is an inflection in his voice, something like startling surprise.

"Yes, Legion?"

"Shepard... Commander..."

The weave flashes rather than ripples and Shepard removes her arm. "Are you alright? Legion?"

"We apologize." A long pause follows where his head swivels, his head flaps quiver, servos hum and waves glitter over the sensor weave. "Our reactions are positive but unexpected in volume."

"The sensor input is overwhelming you?"

"An appropriate approximation."

"I can imagine. My new eyes did the same to me the first few days." She closes her eyes for a moment, remembering the confusion, the headaches, the ghost images against the back of her eyelids. It had taken a while to recognize the images her optical sensors produced as something that her eyes saw.

"Most humans have functional eyes. Geth platforms do not have surface sensors." The golden hexagons of the weave have calmed down. Legion turns his head section down to Shepard, head flap slowly standing up.

Shepard places her hand on the side of Legion's head. Some things are just ingrained in humans and seeking to touch someone's cheek seems to be one of those things. "But humans grow slowly and they adapt to their sensor inputs over time."

"We would like to try touching again, to accelerate adaptation." Legion has raised his arm, his hand hovering over Shepard's upper arm.

"Go ahead." She watches his hand lowering. The golden weave looks different around his hand, the hexagons smaller. "Is the weave denser on your hands?"

"Yes. We assumed that tactile sensor reception is most important for our primary connectors."

"Hands." She grins at him and his head lowers.

"Yes, Shepard-Commander. Hands." He lowers his hand onto her shoulder.

"I'm kind of surprised how warm you are." She watches his hand slowly stroking down her arm until he reaches her hand. His servos whirr as he strokes back up again.

"Our processes are running near capacity to catalogue the sensor reception matrix. Surface heat dissipation is necessary."

Shepard chuckles. "Is steam going to come out of your ears?"

Legion lifts his head in a so very human way that Shepard laughs out loud. She hasn't laughed in so long, it almost sounds foreign coming from her.

"Shepard-Commander, we are not a steam based platform."

"Yes, sorry, was that insulting?"

"No. It was amusing?"

"A bit, yes."

Servos whirr as Legion's head swivels to the side, head flaps rising up. "Humor is an unknown concept to geth."

"That's alright." She still smiles. "Strangely, when I'm here with you, I smile and laugh more than at any other time."

"Is that a positive reaction?" he asks, his head turned away from her.

She pulls his head over to her, well aware that she couldn't make him do that unless he let her, her strength never a match for his. She peers into his light. "Yes, it's very positive and I'm grateful." Where her hand touches his head, the weave pulses slowly. Something looks different about his headlight. "Did you change your light again?"

"Yes, Shepard-Commander. We have researched what wavelengths are pleasant for humans and adapted our platform accordingly." The head flaps come down again.

"That's very thoughtful of you, thank you."

"Our research has shown that humans have many ways of pleasuring each other and that you, Shepard-Commander, are not engaging in any of them."

She laughs out, again. "Am I being shamed for my lack of a sex life? By a geth?"

Spreading his head flaps out, Legion's light blinks once. "We do not wish to shame you, Shepard-Commander."

"That's alright. I'm not ashamed. It's just..." She touches the piece of N7 armor, her armor, that Legion has fixed to his platform. Tracing the rough edges, the ripples in the sensor weave follow her finger. "Sex can complicate things. I'm everyone's commanding officer and these are also my friends and sex crosses a boundary... and I'm not even sure I still can."

"Shepard-Commander? Explain."

"Half, if not more, of me is machine." She draws down the red line of the shoulder piece of her old armor. The real armor, not that replica that Cerberus put into her locker. "I have been rebuilt, this body is like your platform. Not human. I don't want to... I don't want to start something only to find out that this machine platform isn't even capable of sex."

Legion stands very still, only the waves dancing over his sensor weave move as she strokes down the armor and onto his arm.

"Shepard-Commander. We would like to test your capability for sex and experience it ourselves."

"I..." She stares at him, at his head, even if it can't possibly show her any emotions. "I don't know what to say."

"We have researched techniques and would like to apply them." Servos hum as his head flaps move. "If at any point our application is unpleasant, we will stop immediately. Would you allow us to touch you and aim to bring you to orgasm?"

She swallows something down that sounded suspiciously like a giggle and Commander Shepard hasn't giggled since she was ten years old. "Oh damn, I want to say 'you can certainly try' but is that right?"

"We do not see how it could be wrong but we have to admit that the emotional implications that organics apply to sex are foreign to us."

She looks at Legion, his body made of sinew cables and armor. The golden sensor weave pulses like a heartbeat. Nothing about his body looks soft and welcoming but maybe that is what she needs?

Shepard has never been one to wallow and waiver. "Why the hell not, weirder things have happened. EDI?"

"Yes, Commander?"

"Privacy, please."

"Logging you out, Commander."

She kneels down to unbuckle her boots and kicks them away. "Just a few things. You will not talk about this with anybody, unless we have a medical emergency and Dr. Chakwas needs to know."

"Understood, Shepard-Commander."

Pulling her pants down and folding them, old habits die hard, she hesitates only shortly before she takes off her tank top and her underwear too. "You may record your experiences but you are not going to share them with the geth collective. I don't want to wonder if the next geth prime I see knows about my erogenous zones."

"Acknowledged, Shepard-Commander. We will shield this memory from the collective."

She turns back around to him, now fully naked. Usually she's very conscious of the marks and red glowing defects in her skin but with Legion she doesn't care. She can't imagine that a geth platform has a concept of human beauty standards. "Here I am. I'm curious what your research has taught you. I hope Joker's porn collection wasn't part of it."

"Shepard-Commander, we would like to apply neural connectors." Legion holds up a thumb sized pad of a kind that Shepard has seen in the med bay before. Applied to specific sections on the body, it allows omni-tool connections to acquire readings and can also be used to stimulate neural nodes.

"Go ahead." She waits, holding her arms out.

Legions steps forward and but ignores her arms. "Turn around, Shepard-Commander." When her back is turned to her, he places neural connectors on the back of her neck and along her spine, always in pairs. "Turn back around, Shepard-Commander." He places the last two neural connectors right above her mons. He takes a step back and his omni-tool lights up as the connectors light up too.

Her own omni-tool pings, relaying the request of his omni-tool to interface with hers and the connectors. "Are these like the nerve stim ports that quarians use?" She allows the connection and closes the interface.

"Yes, we have modified them for human anatomy. Please stand by for a test."

"A test? What kind of — " the words turn into a gasp and then a indecently loud moan as a wave of pleasure rushes through her body. Her knees buckle as she almost orgasms on the spot.

"Shepard-Commander."

She opens her eyes as the pleasure wave recedes. Legion holds her in his arms. "Holy hell."

"Are you alright, Shepard-Commander?"

"Yes, it was just unexpected." She leans back against Legion's arm, feeling the almost orgasm throbbing inside of her. "No wonder Tali likes her nerve stim system so much. I'm gonna have to ask her so many questions."

"The test was successful in your opinion, Shepard-Commander?"

"Definitely. I'm actually hopeful that this body will work for sex."

"May we continue?"

"Can we sit?" As nice as it is being held by Legion, she feels decidely unsexy being cradled like a sleeping baby in his arms.

"We will sit down." Legion moves back to the bench, sits down and then lifts Shepard up like a ragdoll to sit her back down on his lap. She straddles him now and rests her hands on the sinewy cables of his neck. The hexagonal patterns ripple over his grey form. A faint scent of hot ceramics and hydraulic oil clings to him.

"Can you feel this?" Shepard asks as she chases the waves of the sensor weave with her hands.

"Yes." His headflaps twitch.

She grinds her hips against his. It may be a useless gesture with a geth platform but it's somewhat instinctual. And it feels good for her, grinding against his warm body. His hands stroke over her body, softly and methodical. Not a single piece of skin on her back remains untouched.

She takes one of his hands and kisses the inside of his palm. "Does this feel good?" she whispers against the swirling patterns of the weave.

Legion remains quiet, only the sound of his internal servos is audible.

"Legion?" she says a bit louder, "does this feel good for you too?"

"Too much data available," he says after a moment of hesitation.

"I take that as a yes."

She kisses his hand again and then licks upwards to the tip of a finger. His hand on her back halts and it tingles a bit. The omni-pads spread warmth in her back, her muscles relaxing like from an internal massage. She takes one of his two fingers in her mouth and twirls her tongue around it. Pleasure spreads out like a burning flame, traveling slowly down and she trembles, moaning around his finger.

"Shepard-Commander, may we enter you?"

She leans back in surprise, letting his finger slip out of her mouth. "Enter me with what?"

"We have an omni-emitter on the lower section of this platform."

Shepard scoots back, even though she finds it hard to concentrate by now because of the heat spreading in her abdomen. The omni-pads above her mons are glowing and even though she can't locate the precise feeling, they stimulate her at her very core. Looking over to Legion, she notices the omni-tool strategically placed on his armor, the sensor weave wrapping densely around it.

"Show me," she says.

The omni-tool glows and a translucent dildo in bright orange grows out of it. It's not very large and Shepard lets out a sigh of relief. For a moment she had imagined some monstrous cudgel, but the dildo is of a moderate size, and seems to be modeled after the average human penis.

Shepard holds on to Legion's shoulders and lifts herself up. Aligning herself with the dildo, she sinks down on him. She moves her hips, fucking herself on him, when something changes.

"Is it growing?"

"We are adapting."

"Oh damn." With every thrust, Legion fills her more until she gasps, "Stop, no more growing."

"Acknowledged, Shepard-Commander."

She moves slowly, riding him at her own pace. With every thrust, the nerve stimulations spread out in a wave, colliding inside of her like a feedback loop and she flies higher and higher.

"Legion," she presses out between moans, "do you get sensor feedback from the omni-tool?"

"Yes, Shepard-Commander, we..." Atypical for Legion he doesn't finish his sentence. The sensor weave shimmers on his platform in waves, his head flaps twitch as his head section jerks from side to side. "Yes, we receive sensor feedback."

Shepard thrusts her hips, slowly, drawing the pleasure out. Pressure is building in her abdomen, drawing her vulva tight around his omni-cock. She moans and her head falls back as the pressure grows. "Oh fuck, Legion, I'm gonna come, oh... can you... can you do the test again?"

"Acknowledged."

The omni-pads on her back tingling is the last thing she consciously registers before the wave of pleasure hits her, rushing her over the edge. She moans and screams, holds onto Legion for dear life as wave after wave of pleasure singes through her body, nerve endings sparking, a spiral of intense brightness behind her eyes that she falls into.

"Shepard-Commander."

Someone is still moaning breathlessly and with a delay she registers that it's herself, lying on his chest. "Yes, Legion," she manages to breathe out. Still she is trembling, shuddering from tiny shockwaves through her nerves.

"You have exuded liquids, Shepard-Commander."

"You don't say."

"Did we injure you?"

"No, Legion, you were wonderful. Those liquids are a good sign. I would say ask Joker about it but please don't ask Joker about it."

"We have promised to not speak about this experience with anybody."

"Yes you did. And I know I can trust you." She calms down to the sound of small servos under her ear instead of a heartbeat. Legion holds her, his arms a grounding weight on her back. "This is surprisingly comfortable."

"May we remove the penis substitute now?"

"Yes, let me just..." she pushes herself up on his chest to lift her hips, when the omni-cock just disappears from her vagina. "That was... a bit weird."

"We have shut down the omni-emitter."

"I noticed." She leans back, looking at the dull surface of the ceramics on Legion's armor. "Stay here." She tiptoes over to the pile of clothes and picks up her shirt. Sitting back down on his lap, she wipes the streaks of her wetness from his platform and then uses it to dry her own crotch. "You should give your platform a deep cleanse."

Legion's head angles down. "These secretions do not impair us."

"But you will smell of sex if you don't clean it off."

"We were not aware that olfactoric feedback is that precise."

"Trust me, people will know."

"Shepard-Commander, did you enjoy the sex with us?"

"Yes, thank you, Legion. I enjoyed it very much."

"We are willing to repeat the event, should you wish for it."

"Thank you." Shepard knows that she should get up and return to the world full of demands on her. But straddling Legion's legs, his hands on her back holding her, gives her such a warm feeling of security that she just wants to lay her head back on his chest and listen to his servos until she falls asleep.

A soft ping from her omni-tool reminds her that her one hour of peace is over. "I guess I have to go now."

"Shepard-Commander, we have made an observation."

"What kind of observation?" she asks, stroking over the warm plating on his arm.

"You are not machine."

She sits up, staring at the light in his head. "What?"

"We have researched data about human reactions when sexually stimulated and your reactions are comparable and within the range of 94.2814% of recorded human reactions."

"You mean my body is normal?"

"Normal for a human, Shepard-Commander."

"Oh." She looks down on her body, the open scars with the orange glow behind them the only visible defects on her unmarred form. She lays her hand on her stomach, sliding down to the two omni-pads. The feeling of arousal and satisfaction still lingers there, like a memory. "That means I'm more human than I thought."

She climbs off his legs to pull on her pants and her sweat-shirt, lost in thought as she observes her body doing these things. She turns back to Legion, taking his hand and pressing another kiss to the shimmering sensor weave on his palm. "I don't know if you understand what you've given me. Thank you."

"Acknowledged."

"See you later, Legion."

His head flaps rise up and the dimmed light of his head shines towards her in soft yellow. "Shepard-Commander. See you later."

 


End file.
